“Family’s a messy business,” a character says in Texas Chainsaw 3D, and man, ain’t it the truth?

Forget the buzzing bits for a second, which we’ll get to, and consider just how messed up the family parts have become for Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tobe Hooper’s 1974 drive-in classic.

The film was severing limbs before Saw and modelling skin masks before Silence of the Lambs, but multiple sloppy remakes and reboots have left Leatherface and his crazy hillbilly butcher clan the neglected stepchildren of horror.

Texas Chainsaw 3D aims to fix this by just forgetting the past four decades and just picking up where the original left off — minus the “massacre” part, but with obviously no shortage of moxie.

After a prologue flashback to TCM, including thatfinal whirl between Marilyn Chambers and Gunnar Hansen’s Leatherface (the two actors provide cameos for TC3D), we get the sequel set-up: the Texas murder mansion was burned by righteous hick vigilantes, but the ashes of evil still smoulder.

Seems there were two survivors of that 1974 family inferno: never-say-die Leatherface (now played by Dan Yeager) and a baby girl who has inexplicably aged only about 20 years in the past 40.

She’s the lovely Heather (Alexandra Daddario), illegally raised by adoptive parents in another state. Heather visits the old Texas estate when the truth of her birth is revealed and a dotty departed relative deeds her the keys to the mansion — and also to the basement dungeon (insert orchestral da-dum here).

Needless to say, there aren’t bottles of fine vino lurking in that dungeon, and soon Leatherface is back in business with his blade, hook and saw. The naughtier these kids are, the sooner they die, as per horror convention.

But at least until the midway point, director John Luessenhop (Takers) and his writing committee deliver value for that 3D ticket premium, wasting no opportunity to shove a buzz saw or hook into our faces. This is 3D like it used to be, none of that “immersive” stuff they talk about today.

An effort is made to provide some character definition for Leatherface, which is probably a mistake. He’s much scarier as a cipher.

Things get extremely silly in the third act, such as when a cop sent on his lonesome to the horror house discovers that you should never take an iPhone to a chainsaw fight. Logic was never a strong point of this series, but a few smarts would be nice.

Neither should anyone doubt this unstoppable franchise’s family values — make that Manson Family values.

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